MARK STEYN: America Sticks Out Its Tush.
America has cut to the chase — indeed, beyond the chase. We have reached that moment in Blazing Saddles when Mel Brooks throws away the script, and the brawling cowboys on one Hollywood soundstage crash through the wall into the next soundstage and start slugging the gentlemen of the chorus rehearsing a dance number called “The French Mistake”:
Throw out your hands!
Stick out your tush!
Hands on your hips
Give ’em a push
You’ll be surprised
You’re doing the French Mistake…America has literally lost the plot. On the last soundstage, all parts are interchangeable: Men become women, and the grizzled butch coaches of college athletics can’t wait to put ’em on the ladies’ track team. Women become men, and then pregnant men, and then threaten the hospital for the humiliation of having to give birth in a “maternity ward”. Warner Bros gives J K Rowling the bum’s rush for being so out of it as to think periods are something women have. In the TERF wars, lesbians are transphobic because they don’t wish to date women with penises. At dark on the streets of US cities, wispy, spindly, elderly eternal “college” boys cheer on hefty psycho-trannies with purple hair and hirsute cleavage as they light up precinct houses. Indulgent prosecutors release them without bail – or, if bail is still quaintly required, Seth Rogen or a Joe Biden staffer will cover it. Stories with less helpful narratives – Democrat Congresswomen getting carjacked, or blacks slaughtering blacks every weekend in Chicago, or black criminals (sprung from the big house by woke DAs) mowing down white grannies at a Christmas parade – are instantly memory-holed. Even real people adjust their actual lives to conform with the needs of the greater narrative: Thus the Vice President of the United States, the first in history to announce her pronouns on Twitter, purports to have celebrated “Kwanzaa” during her childhood in, um, a high-caste Indian household in, er, Quebec.
This is a way more surreal finale than Blazing Saddles. In today’s America, everything’s ablaze[.]
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Pace Mel Brooks, it’s not a “French Mistake” but an American one: Emanuel Macron may be a metrosexual globalist dinky boy but he denounces “le wokisme” more vigorously than any anglo leader, because he grasps that it infects everything, and in America and Her Majesty’s dominions has already done so.
In France, le wokisme comes a massive case of deja vu: “But why now, and why in a country like France, with its very different history from the United States? For that matter, why has wokeism taken hold in other European countries, where the radical movement seems in many ways to be an imitation of its American counterpart? In France, there’s an oft-noted irony within the answer. Despite vocabulary that seems appropriated from American academia, the main concepts originated with a group of leftist French academics in the 1960s and 1970s, who became the rage in many American universities and whose ideas, though simplified and sometimes caricatured, have been enthusiastically reimported into France.”